Volunteers harvest hazelnuts for the pigs

Entire crop of Wisconsin farm goes toward nutty-tasting pork

Utter the word hazelnut to most people, and they gush about the sweet Italian spread Nutella. But Jeannie Herold thinks meat.

Herold, who owns 50 acres in Eagle called Hazel Valley Farm, has been feeding her free-range Red Wattle pigs homegrown hazelnuts for five years. For the same amount of time, she has sought the help of neighbors, family, friends — and anyone else who would like to participate — in harvesting the hazelnuts at the end of summer.

On a Saturday late in August, about two dozen volunteers scattered themselves among Herold's 10 acres of hazelnut bushes. From about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., they reached into the bushes to snap off the bundles of hazelnuts, which are covered in green, leafy casing. Midday Herold served them lunch, including ham from her hazelnut-fed pigs.

"It gets kind of overwhelming at first because there's all these rows and all these bushes, and this is new to me," said Tina Schroeder, a friend of the Herolds. "Some of the bushes are loaded with hazelnuts, and some you just kind of pick (quickly), and you keep going because there isn't a lot there."

By the end of the day, volunteers had picked about 650 pounds; that's with the husks on and prior to drying. Altogether Herold is expecting to harvest about 17,000 pounds this year, 5,000 more than last year.

Herold will be picking the rest of the harvest herself, with some help from her husband, who has a full-time job (she's the farmer). Every day until the end of September, she'll pick all day starting at 6 a.m., with a few breaks for daily farm chores. Listening to the RockMyRun app on her iPhone makes the time pass more quickly.

Herold harvests the hazelnuts before they are ripe so that wild animals don't get there first, a problem she's had before, especially once deer show up. She puts the unripe hazelnuts in bags, where she lets them ripen for about five days.

When they're ripe, Herold transfers them to net bags and hangs them to dry for about two weeks. Then it's time to feed them to her 35 pigs. When they eat them — shell and all, she said — it sounds like 20 people in one room popping bubble wrap.

The pigs are fed at least 10 pounds of nuts a day for the first two weeks, and whatever else ripens before they are butchered in October at Lake Geneva Country Meats.

"I don't know if I'd say it's a nuttier taste, but because I know...I can imagine the nuttier flavor," Herold said. "It's just a firmer, juicier meat. Chefs notice that the sides of the meat have a slicker consistency from the oils in the nuts."

Before Herold used her hazelnuts exclusively for feeding her pigs, she sold them at farmers markets and other events.

But that process required even more work, including shelling the nuts, weighing them for pricing and putting them into bags.

Hazelnut growers in the Midwest are few and far between — especially ones who use the hazelnuts to feed their pigs.

When Herold bought the property in 2000, the land was rented by a local farmer who had grown corn, wheat and oats every year, which required a lot of tilling.

But after reading about sustainable farming, Herold stopped leasing the land and planted hazelnuts.

The approximately 5- to 7-foot-tall bushes have a deep root system, she said. The perennials are less damaging to the environment because the soil isn't plowed year after year.

Since planting them, she's learned how to tend to her crop by trial and error, seeking advice from the Upper Midwest Hazelnut Development Initiative and reading about practices farmers use in Oregon, the leading producer of hazelnuts in the United States.

"Sometimes neglect is one of the best ways to care for them because you can overdo it with hazelnut plants," Herold said. She noted that they are fine sharing space with weeds, but that lawn mowers and Roundup are not their friends.

Fill crust with apples, mounded (it will seem like a lot, but they will cook down. Spread hazelnuts over apples. Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the crust. Pour slowly so that it does not run off. Cover with a lattice crust.